(h817 - block 1, activity 13)

With his proposal of ‘Connectivism’ as a new learning theory for the digital age, George Siemens addresses limitations of such well-established theories like behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism which fall short of explaining how knowledge is being created, distributed and acquired in the internet.

The basic assumptions regarding knowledge and the ways it is acquired need to be reassessed with the impact of innovative technologies which lead to a rapidly evolving information ecology: knowledge is abundant, has a shrinking half-life, is developed, shared and acquired in networks and cognitive processes which used to be performed by the learning individual are increasingly supported, supplemented and/or replaced by technology.  

These developments call for new approaches to understand and describe how learning is happening in a a changed information ecology.  Their focus needs to move from the principality of learning individual to the learning network, from the skills of acquiring knowledge to the skills of evaluating knowledge and establishing relevant connections to keep up with the incessant evolvement of relevant knowledge. Siemens assumptions for his theory of connectivism can be opposed to those of behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism as below:

References
Siemens, G. (2004) Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age [online], http://www.elearnspace.org/ Articles/ connectivism.htm(accessed 20 February 2013)

(H817 - block 1, activity 8)

As part of activity 8 in block 2 of H817 I have been thinking about innovation at my workplace.

Do you sense that your innovations (as supporters of learning) have been valued, encouraged, supported?

I am facilitating the adoption of new IT applications in our organization.  We are a team of two people supporting several such projects and naturally our possibilities do not always meet the needs.  There is clearly potential for using more elearning technology to increase our efficiency and reach a wider (and geographically distributed) audience and we are stubbornly suggesting such innovations.  One of the biggest issue we encounter when trying to implement such innovations: initiators of technological innovations often are different people than those who are most affected by them.

What evidence do you have to support your view?

Management and governance of IT projects in our organization focus very much on delivery while training and adoption tend to get underestimated or even neglected.  However, the importance of preparing users for change and helping them adopting new systems and processes in order to realize the full potential of innovations, is acknowledged - one reason why I am attending H817

How widespread is innovation in your organisation?

The travel industry has completely changed over the last ten years due to technological innovations: online booking and interactive travel forums like TripAdvisor have made the traditional travel agency redundant.  On the other hand, these innovations have also opened up very interesting new business options.  Innovation is therefore hot topic with two faces in my organization.

Are there policies or statements that relate to innovation? If yes, how are they implemented?

There are such policies in place and they are implemented via dedicated management training courses to recognise external trends and opportunities and understand their implications for the business.

What implications, if any, does this have for your attitude towards innovation?

It is interesting to see how an organization copes with change. For me personally it is  already quite an effort to keep up at least with those innovations I think are relevant to me (not to mention innovations I have not even noticed).  For a bigger company with structures and processes established over many years, this is challenging to say the least.

(H817 - block 1, activity 5)

In order to judge OpenLearn by wikipedia’s definition of ‘innovation’, I found the distinctions between ‘innovation’ and ‘invention’ as well as ‘improvement’ quite useful:

“Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a better and, as a result, novel idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself. Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing something different (Lat. innovare: "to change") rather than doing the same thing better.”

In terms of ‘innovation’ as doing something different rather than doing the same thing better, OpenLearn is not innovative where it is about making course materials available free and online.  For this purpose it is using new technology to improve access to knowledge and learning materials which help to acquire it.  Here it particularly meets the needs of what McAndrew call the ‘volunteer students’ who are “most interested in more content, tools for self-assessment, and ways to reflect on their individual learning” (McAndrew et al. 2010).

On the other hand, looking at the second type of student, the ‘social learner’ who is mainly interested in  engaging in discussions with like minded people, OpenLearn can be innovative if it succeeds in establishing new communication settings.  In this case it would advance the shift from the supply-push mode of traditional learning environments towards a demand- pull mode of a more collaborative learning practice (Seely Brown, J. and Adler, R. 2008). However as Nuala really neatly sums up her experience (similar to mine) this seems not yet to have happened.

If OpenLearn eventually does establish itself as a forum for social learning, it might also become an enabler of invention, a place where ideas or method itself are being created.

The Openness of OpenLearn
As already stated, OpenLearn offers openness primarily in terms of accessibility and flexibility: the course materials can be accessed from anywhere and at any time by an unlimited audience. It certainly does also serve as an experimental base of new course materials and technologies, but the fact that the larger part of available funding has been used for the initial setting up of OpenLearn, openness in terms of innovation and change might be limited.

Challenges of conventional assumptions about paying for higher education modules
If knowledge and the respective courses and materials to acquire it are available free of charge and - even more important - is more and more developed in a technology enabled collaborative environment, the traditional function of an educational institution as producer of such content might eventually become superfluous. What I think will still be needed - and probably even more so - are supporting and commonly accepted assessment and accreditation services. These (payable) services might best be provided by effective users or “established practitioners”  (Seely Brown, J. and Adler, R. 2008).

References

McAndrew, P., Scanlon, E. and Clow, D. (2010) ‘An open future for higher education’ [online], EDUCAUSE Review Online, (EQ) 33/1, http://www.educause.edu/ ero/ article/ open-future-higher-education (accessed 8 February 2013).

Seely Brown, J. and Adler, R. (2008) ‘Minds on fire: open education, the long tail and learning 2.0’, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 16–32; also available online at http://net.educause.edu/ ir/ library/ pdf/ ERM0811.pdf (accessed 8 February 2013).

(H817 - block 1, activity 3)

Myself not being engaged in any academic or scholarly environment, I was first surprised to learn that blogging is of only marginal significance as a means to assist the publication of research.  Taking on the commonplace of the academic’s pressure to publish I would have expected that blogging would be the much sought after opportunity to publicize one’s ideas and findings.  Furthermore, as convincingly described by Weller in his introduction to ‘The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Transforming Scholarly Practice’, blogging offers many more opportunities for researching and developing ideas: at any stage it is possible to share early thoughts with a community of peers who can provide feedback and link into an extended and creative debate or open up new sources of information, methods and technology (Weller, 2011).

About this reserve in blogging among academics I found Kirkup’s empirical study enlightening: in the statements the twofold face of blogging becomes apparent: the formally less restricted blog does allow for a more personalised and subjective content and language, in fact it encourages the creative play with different identities, but is at the same time perceived as not getting much academic credit, but moreover endangering the academic's reputation (Kirkup, 2010).

Though blogging might not (yet) be recognized as a valid form of academic publishing, its biggest potential I can see in the collaborative aspect as described in the example of Cloudworks by Conole (Conole 2010).  At my own workplace we have been trying to getting a blogging platform off the ground to facilitate informal communication and collaboration.  While some colleagues have been active in quite fruitful conversations, others did not really buy into it.  The active ones were mostly those people who also act as opinion leaders in other environments while talking to some of the latter ones has revealed that even if they were maintaining a blog themselves privately, they did not feel comfortable blogging in at the workplace, very much for the same reasons stated by Kirkup (Kirkup, 2010).

References

Conole, G. (2010) ‘Facilitating new forms of discourse for learning and teaching: harnessing the power of Web 2.0 practices’, Open Learning, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 141–51. [Online] Available at:http://oro.open.ac.uk/21461/2/9735BAEE.pdf

(Accessed 8 Feb 2013)

Kirkup, G. (2010) ‘Academic blogging, academic practice and academic identity’, London Review of Education, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 75–84. [Online] Available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/20714/1/Academic_blogging_ORO.pdf

(Accessed 8 Feb 2013)

Weller, M. (2011) The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Transforming Scholarly Practice London, Bloomsbury Academic. Available online at:

http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/book-ba-9781849666275.xml

(Accessed 8 Feb 2013)